I had a few (quite a few actually) Raspberry Pi’s around and having read about Pi-Hole I decided to put it to good use.
I’ve been using an adblocker for a while, and I’m not getting into the ethics of it but a) I don’t click on ads b) I honestly don’t care about the ethics of it, if I can improve my online experience I will.
So I decided, having just reconfigured my home network in advance of finally getting fibre, to add a pi to remove as many ads as possible for everyone on the network.
The process is very simply – put an iso of Raspian on an SD card (or Micro SD for me as I’m using a pi 2.0) – I used Raspian Jesse light from here with no issues. https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/.
Ssh into your pi -ssh pi@your-ip , password raspberry – I like to use fing (available on iphone and android) if I can’t find it immediately on the network.
Literally cut and paste
curl -L install.pi-hole.net | bash
into the terminal and you’ll be walked through the process. Use the down button to also block ipV6 ads (new option), wait for it all to run and install – 10 minutes or so, then you are done. You can check your PiHole webserver at http://xx.xx.xx.xx/admin/index.php
You can either change the DNS server of each device in your home to the 2 dns servers Pi-Hole suggests you use – or dig into your router to block everything at router level. I did the latter, so its now all automatic.
I also downloaded this hosts file – https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts following a tip on reddit – https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/41hj82/pihole_has_only_blocked_2_ads_today_is_something.
This host files is nicely maintained by Steven and kills some trackers as well as ads – and who wants to be tracked..
I didn’t think instructions to get this into Pi-Hole were clear so here you go –
I downloaded the hosts file and cleaned up the header then searched and replaced to remove the 0,0,0,0 entries. Uploaded it to my server.
I ssh’d into the pi again and used wget to pull the file down then
mv newhostsfile.txt /etc/pihole/blacklist.txt
then
/usr/local/bin/gravity.sh
Pi-Hole then runs and adds another 27,000 adserver and trakers to your blocklist. Nice.
So almost 10% of my traffic is ads – and so I’m saving a good chunk of my bandwidth by doing this. Cost = Raspberry Pi, and less than an hour. Donate if you use it – its useful software and the stats are cool. Its under active development, so definitely worth a try. https://pi-hole.net/